DAY 176 - Lucknow, India

Thanks to everyone who sent a text on Christmas day. Sorry for not replying, but for some reason we could receive messages but not send them. As the tourist board jingle goes, "Incredible India". Quite.

We've had a string of worsts in the last week or so; Kathmandu airport was the worst I've ever had the misfortune to use (a disorganised shed with no staff and no information) and the worst hotel (in the Black Hole of Calcutta). This was getting us down a bit so, like the government, we thought we'd spend our way out of adversity.

We did our sight-seeing in Varanasi in the first two days. A Ghat is a set of stone steps and platforms which lead into the River Ganges. There are lots of them in Varanasi where the locals do everything from washing, swimming, preparing food, taking Hector the cow for a wash and cremating relatives. According to last week's Economist, it's one the most bacterially polluted rivers in the world, and single handedly responsible for most of the childhood diseases in the area. We went for a boat ride, half expecting the wood beneath us to dissolve away as we went. It didn't, but we decided against the swim.

Apart from the Ghats, Varanasi is a very claustrophobic town, with very narrow streets and a definite seedy side. A couple of dodgy blokes tried a scam on me and were quite aggressive when I refused to hand over some cash.

The first hotel in Varanasi was quite nice with hot water and stuff, but for Christmas Eve and Christmas Day we booked ourselves into the most expensive place in the city, The Taj Ganges Hotel. It was very palatial, set in large gardens and had soft mattresses (a first for India). The downside was that it seemed like everything was an opportunity for the hotel and staff to take money off us. Everyone wanted a tip. This wasn't a surprise, but was a bit annoying, as was the constant fussing that surrounded everything we tried to do. Still, we decorated the room as best we could, played tacky Christmas records and attended the "gala" Christmas Eve dinner. This was a fantastic buffet at which I tried a bit of everything and narrowly avoided a repeat of the Beppu incident. There appeared to be general embarrassment and confusion at the party hats from some of the locals, but I don't get embarrassed so led the way in making myself look silly.

On Boxing day we had to drag ourselves away (and pay the bill, which I didn't look at) and get a train to Lucknow. I could almost hear the hotel porter say, "using Indian Railways? I'd better wish you luck now..". Train was two hours late. The hotel we found was drab, overpriced, functional and was run by a zombie who was always at the front desk, day or night, and looked like he'd been stuffed thirty years ago.

The town was more pleasant than Varanasi and had a few crumbling ruins to look at. There's a pattern emerging when it comes to Indian tourist sites. They charge westerners about twenty times what the locals pay, when you get in there the staff are invariably too lazy to open most
of the attractions, they are always poorly maintained (where did our five quid entrance fee go again?) and when they are open there are always bizarre rules to make the visit tiresome ("couples must be shoeless and accompanied by a paid guide").

Today we went to the zoo. It took a while to find the animals. When we did, they all looked miserable and bored, although one pelican that had escaped found the outside world even worse and was trying to break back in. We then got completely lost (thanks for the useless map Lonely Planet) before heading to the train station for our next train to Amritsar.

DAY 169 - Calcutta, India

Ah, India. What is it about India that initially makes me want to run screaming to the airport and get on the next flight home? We've booked our flight back to London now for 6th January, so i'll have to grit my teeth and get on with it.

 

Kathmandu wasn't that bad in the end. Yes the power cuts were a pain, and the restaurants were very expensive, but the hotel had a generator, we ate from the supermarket most of the time and there was lots to see. It was definitely more chaotic than China and the roads were terrible. We walked everywhere as usual although there was rarely a footpath to walk on. The sights were mainly temples and stupas and the like, with one pleasant riverside temple where they burned corpses into the river. Most of the city itself was made up of narrow, busy alley ways lined with shops and small roadside shrines (usually to the Hindu god Ganesh). Great just to wander around and get hopelessly lost in.

 

We flew to Calcutta (or Kolkata as the local ruling communists have renamed it) on Thursday. It was a short flight but we arrived after dark so had booked a hotel in advance. It was a horrid place and the metal grill around the door made it feel more like a prison, so we found another hotel. This one was a bit more expensive (at 25 quid one of the most expensive on this leg to the trip), but it looked ok. How wrong could we be. The noise was terrible. First there was the nightclub on the ground floor pumping loud music throughout the building until midnight. We complained so they moved us to a different room. Above this room they were doing building work from 8 in the morning until 1 the next morning. It was maddening. I'm so glad we've checked out of there, but we'll have to be move careful in future. Problem is, this is the first time on the holiday when we're travelling at the local peak season, so everything is expensive and availability is low. We're sort of hoping that the recession and recent unfortunate events in Mumbai will make things quieter.

 

Calcutta isn't a bad city, but there's not a lot to do here. It's a typical Indian city; grubby, rubbish everywhere, overcrowded, but the food is great and there are some fantastic open spaces to loose yourself in. The Indian Museum isn't up to much though. It's not been dusted since 1950, the labels in the anthropological section still refer to the 1961 census and the fossil and natural history sections are just endless cases of rocks and piles of bones respectively (a picture of the animal the bones came from wouldn't cost much but would enhance the experience no end). That said, the full-term human embryo (pickled) and baby cat with one head and two bodies (pickled) more than made up for it. There's also the Victoria Monument, a fantastic building left over from the Raj that looks like the Taj Mahal crossed with St Paul's.

 

We've booked most of our Indian train tickets now. These will get us to Delhi on New Year's Eve, stopping at Varanasi, Lucknow and Amritsar on the way. The first train journey is tonight which means Christmas in Varanasi. Should be interesting...

 

Merry Christmas to everyone out there. When you're stuffing turkey down on Christmas Day and watching Doctor Who, think of us...

 

 

DAY 163 - Kathmandu, Nepal

After four days on the road in Tibet, getting over the border into Nepal was much easier than feared although not without it's interesting moments.

On the first day out of Lhasa we drove through some spectacular landscape. To be honest, it's for this sort of thing that I travel. Most cities are either identikit blobs and/or cesspits of human squalor.


Lake Yamdrok was a shimmering turquoise pool, shaped like a scorpion (apparently) surrounded by bare light brown mountains (pics at www.energiser.net). Naturally, the Chinese are draining it for hydro-electricity and as no rivers feed it, it'll probably be gone in a few years. That night we stayed in Gyantse, a poor town we'd seen on the BBC's A Year In Tibet. It's main monastery had a fantastic stupa with seventy chapels and a fantastic view from the top. Around the town were several dead dogs who had clearly frozen solid in the sub-zero temperatures at night. We had a heated hotel room. On this occasion.

On the second day we took a short drive to Shigatse, a very poor town further along The Friendship Highway.  We climbed a hill, went "ooh!", then visited another monastery and went "ah!" then ordered some random food at a local restaurant and got stared at lot.

Day three was a long, long drive. The scenery was still fantastic as we drove higher and higher, reaching 5200m and Everest Base Camp. The views of the Himalaya and Mt Everest itself were simply gob-smacking (yes, I've run out of suitable original adjectives and I left my thesaurus at home). The road was a bit hairy getting there but the trip back was in a different league. Our guide decided to take a different route back. The guide book described it as a trekking path. Twice the guide and driver got out, babbling in Tibetan, to check we didn't have a puncture. There were no buildings or people for about 50km, the sun was going down and it was freezing cold. Any incidents and we would have been stuffed. At one point we drove along what I can only describe as a shelf, about 3m wide, sloping down towards a 50m drop-off. We finally got to Tigri, a very, very poor town in the middle of nowhere. The hotel was, well, basic. No shower, no hot water and for all intent and purpose no toilet (this is not an issue for locals who just go anywhere - number twos included - and I'm not exaggerating). There was no heating in the room, so we slept in our clothes and were still cold. Couldn't get out of there quicker in the morning.

On the fourth day we were to drive to the border town of Zhangmu and in the process come down off the Tibetan plateau. We got to within 30km only to find the road closed. They were tarmacking it until 8pm. Dan and I got out and walked. It took five and a half hours and we dropped about a kilometer in the process, but the canyon we walked down was very pretty, changing from scrub-clad rock at the top to lush green Alpine-like forest at the bottom. By the time we got there it was dark and we were knackered. The hotel was rubbish again with no shower or hot water, but it did have a squat loo. It was warmer but we still had to sleep in our clothes.

On Sunday we crossed the border into Nepal and said goodbye to our guide and driver. It was good to be masters of our own destiny again and we immediately went about proving how useless we were at it. After a bit of haggling we got in a taxi to take us to Kathmandu. The tyres looked a bit bald but it was cheap. The road was almost all down hill, there were no seat belts and the driver seemed to have to push the brake petal a few times before the car slowed down. After about half an hour the driver stopped to have his spare tyre fixed which was an annoying delay. Another hour later we got a puncture. We finally made it here and had a shower. Was bliss.

The hotel is quite nice but Kathmandu is expensive, particularly the food. The power goes off for 6 hours a day but the hotel has a generator, so we're only without electricity for a few hours. We've done nothing today except plan the next and last country on this leg - India.

 

DAY 157 - Lhasa, Tibet

For our last day in Chengdu we had a wander around some sights (including a very peaceful if slightly run down monastery) then finished off at a local restaurant with a Sichuan delicacy - the hot pot. This isn't like Betty's hot pot from Coronation Street, it's more like a meat and veg fondue in a very spicy oil. It was very nice but I'd soon had enough. Bit greasy.

We caught the train that evening to Lhasa. It took two days to get there following a horse shoe-shaped route around the mountains, and climbing 3.5km up onto the Tibetan plateau. There was even an oxygen supply in case we felt light-headed. The only symptoms i had though was having to take unusually deep breaths every few minutes or so and an exploding deodourant bottle.

It's only taken a few days here to realise what a complex place Lhasa is. By day the sky is clear, it's warm and the sun's light makes colours more vivid and contrasts more striking. By night it's dark, very cold and a bit oppressive. This is not China, and yet it is. There are troops stationed on every street corner; 16 year old conscripts, balancing a baton round launcher on one arm while attempting to fiddle with their mobile phones in the other. All the streets have been renamed with Chinese names, the writing is mainly Mandarin, and there are the obligatory monuments to The Workers' Struggle sat amidst horrible concrete plazas.

But there is also the real Tibet. The Patala Palace, the one recognisable Tibetan landmark, is set on top of a large rock and looks box-shaped from the outside. Inside however, it's a labyrinth of rooms and corridors with wonky floors, wooden connecting ladders and Buddhist chapels. The colours are magnificent and the smell of incense and burning yak's butter is just the right side of nauseating. Most of the previous Dali Lamas are buried on the top floor, which has to be a first.

We've visited a few monasteries with our guide, most of which have been packed with pilgrims. They take their religion very seriously here. No photos allowed, alas, but one enterprising chapel would allow you to film for 85 quid. I declined.

The timezones around here are all a bit stupid and caught up in politics. Lhasa is on Beijing time (the 'people's time' as the communist mantra goes) so it gets dark (and light) 3 hours later than it should. India is 2.5 hours behind (why the half?). Nepal is 2.25 hours behind, just to make sure you don't confuse it as being part of India (apparently).

DAY 152 - Chengdu, Sichuan, China

By the time we left Dali I was coming down with some sort of flu, but it didn't really hit me until we got to Lijiang. For the next few days I could barely do anything - even standing up sent waves of dizziness through my head. By Sunday though it had worked it's way through my system (from top to bottom) and I was starting to feel better, but Lijiang will be remembered as the town I had to drag myself around.

Lijiang was probably the closest you could come to how old China looked before the modernising started. And how pretty it was. A network of narrow cobbled alleys, each with its own stream and little stone bridges to link them together. Dotted through the town are old wooden water wheels.

Naturally, it hasn't escaped the impact of tourism. Each street is lined mainly with trinket shops, each selling identical over-priced junk, or restaurants, half full at the best of times and with bored-faced locals dressed in local costumes doing a half hearted traditional Naxi jig.

For most of the first day I only noticed the cobbles, as when we did venture out, I barely had the energy to raise my head. Fortunately, by Sunday I was on the mend so we took a tour up to Tiger Leaping Gorge. Apparently at one point it's 4km deep, although from where we were it couldn't have been more than 1 to 1.5. Those nice Chinese people had dug out a cliff-side walkway allowing us (paying) tourists to walk down to the rapids about 3km in. And very impressive it was too, although we didn't see any (real) tigers. On the opposite side of the gorge to where we walked a road had been blasted through, dumping hundreds, nay, thousands of tonnes of rock into the river below. A bit messy really.

On Monday we took a flight to Chengdu in Sichuan. The flight was short but not fun due to a small minority of our fellow travellers misbehaving on the flight (being irritating rather than dangerous), and others using the sick bag as a depository for their flem.

Chengdu is an ugly, grey, concrete, smog-ridden blob. But it does have Pandas. Big cuddly adult Pandas who do nothing but eat and sleep (related to Koalas maybe?), small furry baby Pandas who squeak and roll around like the staff at a PwC Christmas party, and slug-like newly born Pandas who are to ugly to bother with. At the Giant Panda Research Centre we saw all these except the slugs, and learned far too much about the Giant Panda reproductive cycle to be safe just after a large breakfast. The smog was so bad that morning that even though we were outside, we couldn't take a picture without the flash going off, so the results were pretty poor (see the China pictures link at www.energiser.net).

Today we went to see the Grand Buddha of Leshan. It's the biggest Buddha in the world (or summit). It's carved into the cliff by a river about 130km south of here. No-one did a tour down there surprisingly, so we had to make our own way by public bus. I'm proud to say we make it there and back without incident and the Buddha was very... big.

 

The main reason for going to Chengdu was to arrange our trip to Tibet. It's always been expensive and difficult to do, but since the riots there earlier this year it's got a whole lot harder. We've had to arrange and fix our itinerary in advance, we have to have a guide to chaperon us around for the entire visit and we have to pay through the nose for it. That said, it promises to be one of the highlights of the year so hey ho... I'll let you know...